Pacific News Service closes, but lessons continue

1of2Executive editor Sandy Close takes a call in San Francisco at New America Media, an offshoot of Pacific News Service. Both news agencies will be shuttered this week after nearly a half century in the Bay Area.Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

2of2A1978 profile of Pacific News Service in the magazine New West.Photo: Courtesy New America Media

As a fearless news service embedded in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, the San Francisco nonprofit Pacific News Service had a “chicken’s eye” view of the stories it covered.

Executive Editor Sandy Close explained that the best reporting isn’t captured from the lofty perch or soaring viewpoint of an eagle. It often involves discomfort, being a direct witness and kicking up a little dust.

“We were able to be ahead of the curve,” Close said, “not because we had come out of (the mainstream), but because we were 2 feet off the ground.”

Now, after growing too fast and accumulating too much debt, Pacific News Service and its subsidiary, New America Media, will close Thursday. It will end nearly a half century of tenacious coverage, with a mission that started in Indochina but expanded to include unrest in Central America and immigration in California, and above all an increasing focus on producing youth media and news about underrepresented cultures.

All of those things will be part of the legacy. But the biggest vacuum it leaves may be with the young voices New America Media amplified.

Led by Close and her husband, Franz Schurmann, who died in 2010, New America Media created newspapers in juvenile halls, covered violence surrounding drug epidemics from the streets, united media from diverse ethnicities and mentored fledgling journalists who paid it forward.

Empty boxes are stacked to pack office files at the newsroom on Ninth Street in South of Market. New America Media, which once had 90 employees, gave youth and those outside the mainstream a voice.

Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

Malcolm Marshall, editor and publisher of the Richmond Pulse, met Schurmann and Close when he was a teen in the late 1980s. Close approached Marshall after listening to his public affairs radio show on urban/R&B station KSOL.

“Sandy has influenced my life so profoundly. But it’s not just my story. It’s the story of thousands of people,” Marshall said. “They had one of the most interesting newsrooms that you could think of. They were highly intellectual, and they had this crazy idea to let some 17-, 18-, 19-year-olds hang out. They really truly cared what young people had to say.”

The South of Market newsroom on Ninth Street still had that feel one Friday this month, even without any writers behind the rows of computers. Holiday lights wrapped around a large tree. The white board that surrounds a round meeting room table still has markings — the final battle plans for an organization that was one big brainstorming project.

New America Media, which had 90 employees in multiple U.S. newsrooms a few years ago, now has just three to supervise the shutdown. Close’s small dog Tinkerbell darted around between empty chairs, seemingly disoriented by the lack of bustle.

The service had a different vibe when it began in 1969, co-founded by Schurmann and China scholar Orville Schell, who was a student of Schurmann at UC Berkeley.

“We kind of got root-bound, stovepiped in our own little myopic view of what was happening” in Southeast Asia, Schell said. “There was no awareness that the French had been there before us, or the British. That there was a whole other way of looking at it. ... With that in mind we started Pacific News Service.”

The Pacific News Service founders sewed together a network of media supporters — The Chronicle and the Boston Globe were two early subscribers — and covered stories from the ground.

Fifteen-year office manager Mario Navarro (left), longtime executive editor Sandy Close and marketing associate Dana Levine at the New America Media office in San Francisco. Pacific News Service and its offshoot New America Media will close next week, after nearly a half century in the Bay Area.

Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

Early Editor Tom Engelhardt was quoted in a 40th anniversary Pacific News Service edition newspaper about his first gig, sneaking on Travis Air Force Base in Solano County to interview war wounded coming home from Vietnam.

“Pacific News Service in those early years gave the lie to the idea that the antiwar movement and soldiers were generally hostile to and had nothing to do with each other”, he said. “Anti-war G.I. were regularly in our offices; we published the on-the-ground work of a soldier fighting in Vietnam ... and, as it happened, the medic who snuck me onto Travis became a good friend.”

After the war, Schell and Engelhardt departed. New Executive Editor Close came in, with experience that included founding the Oakland-based Flatlands newspaper in 1965, covering neighborhoods being radically changed by East Bay development.

The “new” Pacific News Service was close to a full reset, but the organization was influenced by the spirit of the war-era coverage of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

“It was the idea of finding unique voices that weren’t in general market media as a rule, and turning them into your reporters, your writers,” Close said. “Doing what Pacific News Service did in Indochina, but applying it to the changes going on inside the United States was just fascinating. And it grew into major news beats.”

Pacific News Service covered stories that weren’t getting attention in mainstream newspapers, including how immigration from Central American countries was transforming U.S. cities. In the mid-1990s, Close met with 25 journalists from Asian, Latino and other media outside the mainstream, to talk about sharing content.

There were many institutional successes. Close won a MacArthur Foundation genius grant in 1995. The youth voice-infused Yo! magazine launched, with radio as well. A short documentary the service commissioned and Close co-produced, “Breathing Lessons,” won an Academy Award.

Rodriguez said Close approached him after the publication of his 1982 autobiography “Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez.” Even as he felt under assault by the mainstream, Close became a mentor, supporting his career and helping him network.

“I think Sandy underestimates her influence on a generation of journalists,” Rodriguez said. “I was deeply influenced by her notion of what constitutes news. ... The question of youth was always a question in her mind: What are young people thinking? Her sense of young people who were lost in America, and you were redefining America by finding their voice. That was the gradually expanding America of Sandy Close.”

Close and Schurmann were intellectuals who didn’t talk down to new writers. Marshall remembers Schurmann taking groups of young journalists to a nearby Mexican restaurant, and he would “pull out a map of the world and start telling us about impromptu world history, in a very interesting way. ... There was nowhere else to get this. We were like, ‘Who are these crazy white people?’”

Close has been hearing these compliments since Nov. 1, when New America Media announced it was closing. But she has also mulled what she calls her personal failure to keep the place running.

Four multiyear grants dried up around 2013. Despite that, Close said she continued to fund projects and take on new ones. Toward the end, she said, the debt got too big. The staff was cut to 32 in the summer, then 10 in October. Some youth programs, such as Youth Outlook and Silicon Valley De-Bug, will continue as nonprofits on their own.

“I have to take responsibility for that, and I do. I blame myself,” Close said, during one of several confessionals.

Former staffers say the blow to the media landscape is immense. The news came just days after Gothamist, including local site SFist, abruptly announced its closure. While youth voices can be heard far and wide on social media now, traditional media outlets for their work are limited.

“Any journalistic effort these days that has any integrity is worth supporting because it’s a melting block of ice in the sun,” Schell said.

Close makes it clear she doesn’t want to reboot New America Media — “let it rest in peace,” she said — but she hopes to stay involved, perhaps by embedding projects in existing nonprofits, or finding funding to continue successful programs.

Rodriguez said Close should be taking stock of what she helped build, not what might have been. Forty-eight years is a long time, and New America Media will live on in the journalists it influenced, and the projects they’ve created and will start in the future.

“I keep saying, ‘I’m not interested in the guilt. I’m interested in what you’ve achieved,’” he said. “‘And the fact that you’re not finished.’”

Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle’s pop culture critic and host of the podcast The Big Event. The Bay Area native has worked at The Chronicle since 2000, and was a Chronicle paperboy from 1982 to 1984. He reviews movies, television and comedy, covers entertainment, creates multimedia projects and writes the Our San Francisco local history column. The Big Event is recorded in The Chronicle’s basement archive. Hartlaub lives in Alameda.